SWANTON] INDIANS OF THE SOUTHEASTERN UNITED STATES 405 



each side of the mouth of St. Johns River. The sizes and arrange- 

 ments of these houses have been carefully worked out by Bushnell 

 (1919, pp. 84-86). The town house, or "warehouse," as Dickenson 

 calls these structures, belonging to the town of Santa Cruz, the 

 nearest to St. Augustine, was about 60 feet in diameter, with a 

 square smoke hole 15 feet each way, and had beds around the wall 

 divided into 16 compartments by the wall timbers. The council 

 house of San Juan's is not described, but it was still larger. That of 

 Santa Maria, the largest town of all, seems to have been 81 feet 

 in diameter, though the actual figure given is 31. It had a smoke 

 hole 20 feet square and a bed divided into 32 sections. The words 

 "against which the house is built" used by Dickenson of the quadrangu- 

 lar opening in the center suggests the same central element of 4 posts 

 as was common in the Creek hot house. 



There is relatively little information regarding the common houses. 

 Speaking of the houses of both chiefs and commoners in Guale near 

 St. Simons Island, San Miguel says: 



All of the walls of the houses are of rough timbers and covered with palmetto 



all the houses are small, because, as they have little to keep in them, they 



make them only for shelter, and for this reason the houses of the chiefs are also 

 small. (Garcia, 1902, p. 195.) 



The chief of one of these towns took San Miguel into his house and 

 the visitor remarks that "he had three or four little rooms." That 

 house in which the Spaniards were lodged is described as 



a big cabin, circular in shape, made of entire pines from which the limbs and 

 bark had been removed, set up with their lower ends in the earth and the tops all 

 brought together above like a pavilion or like the ribs of a parasol : three hundred 

 men might be able to live in one : it had within around the entire circumference 

 a continuous bed or bedstead, each well fitted for the repose and sleep of many 

 men, and because there was no bed-clothing other than some straw, the door of 

 the cabin was so small that it was necessary for us to bend in order to enter ; an 

 arrangement due to the cold although it was spring when we arrived; and so 

 that one may not feel the cold at night and may sweat without clothing it is suf- 

 ficient to cover the doorway at night with a door made of palmetto, and to 

 light two sticks of firewood within: with this alone we perspired at night and 

 when we were indoors did not feel the cold during the daytime. (Garcia, 1902, p. 

 195.) 



The cabin belonging to the Timucua chief of San Pedro on Cumber- 

 land Island "was greater than those I have described, and it was open 

 above with a skylight such as can be made in a cabin, the cabin being 

 round in shape and made of entire pine trees" (Garcia, 1902, p. 199). 



Oviedo gives us some confusing, and possibly confused, notes re- 

 garding the public buildings and ossuaries in the province of "Gual- 

 dape," which I am inclined to identify with part of the Guale Country. 

 He speaks of the "houses or temples" in which the dead were buried 

 as having walls of stone about 8 or 9 feet high set in mortar made of 



